For the Love of Lab Rats: Kinship, Humanimal Relations, and Good Scientific Research
Powered By Xquantum

For the Love of Lab Rats: Kinship, Humanimal Relations, and Good ...

Chapter 1:  An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship
Read
image Next

This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.

concluded that these very opportunities seem to reassert their force. Finkler (2000) wrote, in the context of genetic testing and risk counselling, that ‘people are compelled to recognize consanguinity even when in the lived world they define family by a sense of sameness that may be grounded in friendship or sharing of affect and interest rather than in genes’ (p. 238). Drawing on this, Strong (2001) argued compellingly that people should examine just how much ground has actually been covered in this regard. Strong noted in particular these new contexts and the challenges they present to kinship studies:

Schneider’s critique of early- to mid-twentieth century kinship studies as exporting Euro-American notions of natural relatedness to cultures that divide up the world differently appears to have presaged the dissolution within Euro-American culture of the foundational status of ‘nature’ as the ground on which human enterprise is both reflected and constructed. Thus, Marilyn Strathern’s creative dialogue with Schneider in After Nature (1992a) is something like a key text for the new studies. ‘Nature’ now seems, in an often-quoted phrase, ‘enterprised-up’ (Strathern 1992b), a notion that Paul Rabinow captures in the term ‘biosociality’ (Rabinow 1992). This means two things: it will not be obvious what ‘kinship’ is, for it will vary contextually, and, for that reason, there can probably be no universal theory of it. The new kinship studies apparently reflect this uncertainty and provisional particularity. Indeed, although all of them still deploy the term ‘kinship,’ they differently modify it. Kinship is now ‘postmodern’ (Finkler 2000) or ‘nonmodern’ (Carsten 2000:31—after Latour). Is it also ‘flexible’ (Martin 1994)? (pp. 403–404)

In this book, I turn to insights made by Haraway to begin to think through just how flexible kinship can be in the context of the laboratory. The ways in which Haraway asked questions about nature are helpful in this endeavour. In her Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991), Haraway’s chapter ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ appears. In it, Haraway created ‘an ironic political myth’ (p. 149) which combines postmodernism with socialist feminism. The cyborg, ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of